[ExI] medical marijuana

[BillK]

On 7/7/10, Ryan Rawson wrote:
> You are kind of conflating 2 things here (along with insulting those
>  of us who are California residents with your pithy and lame nickname):
>
>  - The current proposal which will legalize and regulate Cannabis
>  similarly to alcohol
>  - Medical Cannabis has been legal for 15 years
>
>  In any case, Cannabis has centuries or millenium of use (along with
>  alcohol, etc) and demonstrated it's human safety.
>
>

Quote from DEA:
There are no FDA-approved medications that are smoked. For one thing,
smoking is generally a poor way to deliver medicine. It is difficult
to administer safe, regulated dosages of medicines in smoked form.
Secondly, the harmful chemicals and carcinogens that are byproducts of
smoking create entirely new health problems. There are four times the
level of tar in a marijuana cigarette, for example, than in a tobacco
cigarette.

Morphine, for example, has proven to be a medically valuable drug, but
the FDA does not endorse the smoking of opium or heroin. Instead,
scientists have extracted active ingredients from opium, which are
sold as pharmaceutical products like morphine, codeine, hydrocodone or
oxycodone.
------------------


The FDA and big pharma want to extract the active ingredients from
cannabis and make products that can first be tested, then marketed
through the medical profession. Wikipedia claims that while the FDA
has not approved marijuana it has approved THC (a compound found in
cannabis) as an active ingredient for medicinal use.

Legalizing possession of small quantities of cannabis for registered
medical use by seriously ill people as authorised by a doctor is
hardly likely to produce much tax income for the states or stop many
ordinary people being jailed for possession.


BillK